There you are idly using your computer when, suddenly, you begin to hear a series of terrifyingly ominous noises coming out of your speakers. Among them is the horrifically wet sound of someone being stabbed, the manic laugh of a woman (or is she sobbing?), and an atmospheric rumbling that evokes the creepy feeling of being deep, deep underground. These sounds repeat again and again until you finally identify the source: Somehow, Steam's music player (you didn't even know it had one, did you?) is randomly playing sound effects from horror classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It sounds like the beginning of some creepypasta internet myth, but this is exactly what's been haunting redditor 'YouNiqueUser' and others over on the Steam subreddit.

Yesterday, YouNiqueUser posted a thread on the Steam subreddit begging for help after twice returning to their computer to find it randomly playing that series of creepy Amnesia sound effects. "Anyone know what they are/or how to delete them?" They implored, including a screenshot of Steam's media player with a playlist of several inconspicuous sound files with names like "00_laugh - sounds". I've uploaded the tracks and embedded them below so you can hear them yourself.

"Once I came home after work and they were playing," YouNiqueUser explains. "Second time after I came back to PC after dinner. They even play with my PC sleeping/monitor black. Can't remember if my PC was hibernating in the instance I came home from work. I think it was as I was gone for 10 hours."

Understandably confused and a little creeped out, YouNiqueUser thought someone might've hacked into their computer and was playing a very cruel trick, but a virus scan turned up nothing and the thread quickly filled with comments from others experiencing the same strange phenomenon.

"Are you serious? It's been happening to me to, and its freaking me the fuck out," wrote CabbageMans. Others chimed in saying they were having the same problem but with different games ranging from Cities: Skylines to Dota 2. 

"I don't even own [Amnesia: The Dark Descent] and I got the files," says another redditor. "Don't know how, I'm too much of a chicken to play the game. It started last week for me, every now and again I here grunting and other ominous sounds."

What's weird though, is that no one knows exactly why this is happening. Steam has a lot of unnecessary and easy-to-miss features like its music player, which can be set to automatically import sound files from downloaded Steam games or other directories. The idea, presumably, is to make it easy to access the soundtracks of games you own. But the problem is that Steam's music library can't distinguish between a music and, say, the sound of a demon eviscerating a corpse (though I guess we all have a different preference for background music).

Above: A video of Steam playing a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech.

For years now, players have been complaining about a bug that causes Steam to automatically start playing random sound files loaded into its music library. My favorite is a thread from three years ago when some poor user's Steam client kept playing Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential speeches—though, god knows how they got into his Steam library. Curious, I set up my own music library to auto-import sound files from my games directory, which mysteriously turned up rock classics like Jimmy Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower". I have no idea why this is in my Steam folder.

What's clear is that either Steam has a very weird bug or people somehow keep unintentionally triggering Steam's music player—but no one is exactly sure. That isn't much consolation if you, like YouNiqueUser, are not keen on randomly hearing terrifying ghost noises. The only way to be safe is to follow one redditor's advice and turn off automatic importing and clearing out Steam's music library.

Or just throw your whole computer out because it's obviously haunted.

If you loved the world of Amnesia: The Dark Descent but found it all too scary, then The Shadow of the Ramlord might be more your speed. It's an hour-long Lovecraftian adventure built using assets from The Dark Descent and its sequel, A Machine for Pigs, and promises to be light on scares but heavy on environmental storytelling, atmosphere and necromancy.

"Our custom story is very much directed towards the player who enjoys a deliberate pace, absorbing the narrative and level design clues, and feeling immersed in a story-first experience," says the development team at Dark Craft Studios. They say it'll appeal to those who enjoyed SOMA, the semi-scary, philosophical survival horror from Frictional Games, the same developer that made the Amnesia games.

The Shadow of the Ramlord tells the story of the Baron of Caecea Manor, who wants to summon a "malignant being" known as the Ramlord. His wife, who is being held prisoner, has smuggled a letter out of the manor, begging for help. It arrives in your hands, and it's up to you to investigate. "The three characters' fates are woven together in an intricate, disquieting narrative through the occult, madness, and despair," says the description on the ModDB page.

You'll explore seven separate maps, including the manor itself and the catacombs below, and it'll take between 45 minutes and an hour to finish. It's the third part of a Lovecraftian trilogy made by Dark Craft Studios—the previous two were mods for Crysis. 

It's one of the most popular mods on ModDB right now, and the early reviews from players are promising. If you have a spare hour, it might be worth checking out. You can download it here.

Frictional Games has announced that Amnesia: The Dark Descent will be getting a "hard mode" on September 28.

In a move that's a huge contrast to the Safe Mode, introduced to Frictional's SOMA, a couple of years ago, Amnesia will now be even more challenging. According to Frictional, the new beefed up difficulty will make it "a little harder to beat the game."

The changes from the original difficulty mean autosaves will be disabled, manual saving will cost four tinderboxes, losing all sanity will result in death, and oil and tinderboxes will be more hard to come by. 

And if that's not enough to get you crying into your keyboard, monsters will be able to locate you more easily, they'll be faster when they do, and are likely to make shorter work of you as their damage has also been increased. They'll stick around for longer too, presumably to bask in your misery and/or death. Yikes.

Completing the game on Hard mode will net you a sparkly, new trophy, aptly called 'Masochist'. You'll be able to choose between 'normal' and 'hard' mode when starting a new game but will be unable to switch part-way through, so choose carefully.  

The quality of Amadeus, an Amnesia mod by Swedish creator Reminiscity, becomes clear when I step into the main hall of the old house where the story takes place. It’s a beautiful, grand room, with cold moonlight pouring through stained-glass windows, glass domes in the ceiling, a velvet-carpeted stairway, and eerie oil paintings hanging on the walls. It’s probably prettier than the main game’s Brennenburg Castle, which is quite an achievement for a free mod. 

Inspired by Christopher Nolan’s wonderful The Prestige and, curiously, the work of TV mind-wizard Derren Brown, Amadeus tells the story of Cornelius Campbell, a magician trading under the name The Amazing Alduin. Cornelius’ career has come grinding to an undignified halt, and where once he was able to fill the biggest theatres, he now struggles to attract even a meagre audience. This is what tips him over the edge, sending him spiralling down a path of madness as he does whatever it takes to become popular again—even if that involves something unsavoury. Which, this being a mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is a distinct possibility.

Clocking in at four-to-six hours, depending on how cautious a player you are, there’s a significant chunk of game to be found here. And it has the production values you’d usually expect from an in-house Frictional project, with surprisingly decent voice acting, bespoke animations and some stunning environmental art. Early in the game I wake up in a cell and find myself walking through an underground cave network, with waterfalls and shafts of light spilling through cracks in the rocks. It’s a really impressive space, and I’m not surprised when I learn that it took Reminiscity over three years to complete this mod. I’m sure he feels well rewarded: the game has received a parade of enthusiastic 10/10 user reviews on ModDB, and was also voted as that site’s Amnesia Mod of the Year for 2017.

As a studio, Frictional encourages modding, and released a level editor to allow Amnesia players to create their own custom stories with relative ease. This, however, means there are a lot of mods out there and many of them are, honestly, pretty rubbish. But Amadeus is striking in that almost every aspect of it feels professional. The pacing is magnificent, leaving a good amount of tension-building space between the scares to really make them count. And that’s something that eludes even the creators of big, commercial horror games with Hollywood movie budgets. Reminiscity seems to understand the importance of restraint and subtlety. 

Although the mod does stick closely to the Amnesia formula, it also mixes things up a little—and makes some changes for the better. Some of you will disagree, but I always thought the sanity-health-lamp management side of Amnesia was a chore, and got in the way of the story. So I was glad to discover that Amadeus gets rid of the need to constantly hunt down laudanum, sanity potions, and tinderboxes, making it feel more like divisive sequel A Machine for Pigs—which it also borrows some assets from. That will turn some hardcore Amnesia fans off, but for me it gives the story and atmosphere room to breathe.

Monster mash

Amadeus does fall flat occasionally, however. Although I do appreciate the decision to create original monsters for the mod, I never found any of them that scary. A lot of the puzzles are cleverly designed—particularly the one that involves playing a tune on a piano—but the difficulty of some of the trickier ones left me frustrated rather than challenged. And there’s a general feeling of front-loading, with some of the later scenes lacking the finesse of the opening hours. But in light of everything else it does well, I’d still recommend it, flaws and all. Especially since it costs absolutely nothing to play, providing you own an up-to-date copy of Amnesia. 

Designing horror games is difficult, and for every one that nails it, there are a dozen that sink into cliche and lazy jump scares. Other mods for Amnesia shoot themselves in the foot by relying on things leaping out of the shadows, or sudden loud noises, too much. And that’s why Amadeus stands out: it knows when to hold back, teasing you, keeping the tension tight like piano wire. If you want to play for yourself, Amadeus is available on ModDB and installation is as easy as dropping a folder into your install directory and running a .bat file. Eight years later, it’s great to see Amnesia still firing modders’ imaginations.

Stressful horror romp Amnesia: Dark Descent and its follow-up, A Machine for Pigs, have been in so many bundles that you might already own them without realising it, but if you don’t, then you can pick them up on Steam for free. The deal is for a limited time, but we don’t know how long that will be, so you’ll probably want to snatch them up right now. 

Both Amnesia games are free individually, but for some reason the Amnesia Collection still has the full price. Instead, you can either get them separately, or you can click on 'package info' and get taken to the free version of the collection. It’s a little bit counter-intuitive.

Occasionally I’ll fire up the game that made screaming on YouTube popular, only to be reminded that I can only stomach about 30 minutes in this brilliant but terrifying haunted house. I’ll probably finish it after every single human on the planet owns a copy. 

Once you add Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs to your Steam account, you’ll be able to keep them after the free period has ended. So go do that. 

The Humble Store is offering a sweet deal on two of the most frightening, disturbing videogames ever created. For the next two days, the Amnesia Collection—The Dark Descent and A Machine For Pigs—is completely free. 

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is famously scary, to the point that it became staple fare for reaction video freakouts on YouTube. It's an utterly crushing, physically and emotionally exhausting experience that somehow manages to keep getting worse, almost to the very end—and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way. A Machine For Pigs is very different—creepy, disturbing, but more cerebral than in-your-face, and almost certainly a better candidate for a replay. 

The Amnesia Collection will be available until 1 pm ET on January 27. Take note that the individual games are still full price, so if you want them free, the collection is the way to go. And speaking of freebies, the Humblers also recently announced that Owlboy, the "lush, story-driven" 16-bit-style platformer, has been added as an immediately-unlocked game to the current Humble Monthly Bundle, headlined by Civilization 6 and a pair of DLC packs.   

I really don’t want to die. Someday I will, though, and it will probably suck. I worry about drowning, being burned alive, bears having me for dinner (it happens where I’m from), or tripping and bashing my head open on a gumball machine—and most popular horror games are good at turning those fears, other than the gumball one, into palpable threats. But in focusing so much on depicting the act of dying, they ignore why I’m scared of dying. 

Games are good at delivering terror. They specialize in the apprehension that precedes an awful revelation. But once you’ve died, which is the horrific revelation part, suddenly there’s no longer anything to anticipate, and therefore nothing to be terrified of. Death becomes a certainty, and in traditional try-again games, it’s making the experience far less scary than it could be. 

In my review of Outlast 2, I said that its “commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.” Most scenes take about five deaths to figure out. Five deaths is enough to see a monster, learn its simple AI routine, and memorize your escape route as well as your walk home from work. Since you know that finishing the game requires staying alive until the end, the overarching narrative tension also loses strength. And because you can die and restart at the last checkpoint, those spooky punches lose more of their sting with each attempt. Sure, sometimes you’ll get a grisly animation, and if getting your dick split in half over and over can sustain your interest here into oblivion, great. But even Resident Evil 7, which starts off with some of the best innovations in horror game history, falls into the same shoot or hide or die death trap over time. 

Popular horror games in the same style know how to tap into fleeting dick-splitting fears and often confront deeper psychological fears in their overarching themes, but the threat of death and repetition is still the dull captain steering the tension. It’s about time they stop trying so hard to kill us.  

Death to death

Death has always been games' most popular punishment. You can fail to perform a task and in the fiction of the world, die. Bummer! Back to the last checkpoint. Threatening the player with lost time through death is an easy way to build tension, but the tension is entirely detached from the fiction. There’s no time to focus on the monsters chasing us. 

During my second playthrough of Frictional Games' SOMA, I installed a mod called “Wuss Mode” that turns off predatory enemy AI. Instead of sneaking around the monsters, I got to know them—and yeah, I know what it sounds like. I watched them lumber around each environment like blind dogs. I didn’t feel physically threatened, but in observing the creatures, I started to sympathize with them. Like Frankenstein's monster, they were only dangerous in appearance, fearsome only in their most recognizable human qualities. What were they thinking? Why were they thinking? I had time to consider SOMA’s headier themes on what it means to be alive, to be a human. I was fine the first time I played it, but without obligatory videogame baddies shoving me through the experience, I soaked it in like a good novel, pausing on moving passages at will.

I still felt scared, not because I was being bludgeoned with a biomechanical arm, but because because I was confronted with some awful, scary truths about the nature of life. There’s terror in the build up towards a horrific revelation in finding out what the monsters represent, and uninterrupted time to reflect those ideas back onto myself. Consciousness, man. What even is that stuff? Hell if I know. And that’s scary enough. Some of the best horror games are built around the same idea, of producing horror without death as a system.

But some just want to be schlocky fun, a ride through some spooks and gore and dim hallways. That’s all good and wholesome, but the issue remains: death and repetition are still a tedious, emotional dead end. If they’re a necessary part of the experience, how can games sustain interest and scares five attempts in?  

Systems make great painkillers

What games like Outlast 2 and Amnesia get wrong is often cited as their boldest design choice: putting limitations on or completely removing combat. I don’t mean to say that I want to kill every enemy in those games, but restricting players to a tiny set of interactions is also a good way to stunt their creativity. If the enemies are on full alert and I’m stuck hiding, I only have two primary options: sneak or run. Chances are I’ll die doing both, and I’ll need to make several attempts to learn patrol routes or where to sprint next to trigger a checkpoint. 

I can’t pick up an errant plank and bash a cultist over the head with it or grab a torch and light an oil drum on fire as a distraction—there’s no incentive to being clever and terror only works if you don’t know where the boogeyman is hiding. But as opposed to one right way and one wrong way to navigate an area, taking a more systems-driven approach to horror game design can give you a dozen ways to get through with style, 10 ways to barely scrape by, and countless ways to screw up and die.

In Dishonored 2, if I’m backed into a corner, I can still improvise an escape plan. Maybe I toss a bucket to distract and then swan dive into my doppleganger from six stories up. Or possess a guard, hop to a rat, and scurry away. It’s not the perfect example because it turns the player into a clever god, but still makes me wonder what a horror version of such a system-focused game would look like.

Imagine one that has the kind of player freedom that enables this astounding Dishonored 2 run, but instead of killing dozens of guards, you knock over a stack of books in the library to throw the monster off your tail. Then you sneak up and stab it with a broken broomstick, which permanently slows the monster down, giving you time to cover yourself in mud to hide your scent or build construct some combustible traps out of found objects in the workshop.  

With that kind of systemic variety, something like Resident Evil 7 could feel like an unsanctioned Home Alone sequel where the burglars want to eat your face. I’d love nothing more than to see Jack react to a barrage of swinging paint cans to the mug.

The more options a player has to evade a threat, then the more deaths can be justifiably blamed on the lack of player ingenuity rather than narrow level design or failing to do the prescribed sprint-and-stealth dance. To be clear, the kind of systems I’m suggesting should not make the player feel more powerful than their pursuer. They just need to provide more exit routes and the chance to think creatively in desperate moments. I just want to run through a few more options before going with ‘die and try again.’ I want to feel solely responsible for my survival and I want surviving to be a new process every time. 

Still, the problem of the horrific revelation remains. When the player dies and gets to try again, smart systems can make terror renewable, but what about the comedown after you see the monster? And what if it backs you into a corner, helpless? Should that be game over? If terror can be a renewable resource, then so can horror. 

Variety is the spice of death

While I don’t consider it to be the second coming of survival horror so many do, Resident Evil 7’s first few hours house some of the best ideas for dealing with death I’ve seen in popular horror games. All videogames have the death problem, convinced that as soon as a bad guy gets you, they’ll just kill you and call it a day. A villain that just murders as quickly and efficiently as possible is a boring one.

Jack Baker, the first monster you meet in Resident Evil 7, is a more complex, charismatic dude than a tag-‘em-and-bag-‘em killer looking to just clock out for the day. He’s the kind of guy who wants to take his time. He calls out your name like a schoolyard bully, compares you to a pig and summons you for dinner, grins and laughs and stares directly at you from across the room. And he never outright sprints for you, opting for a steady, brisk walk as if your end is already assured. 

When Jack does catch you, the majority of deaths end with a gruesome animation and a game over screen—the terror falls off and diminishes as we start again. But during a few specific instances, death is not the end.  

Early on, Jack can corner you in a room behind the kitchen and knock you to the floor after which he chops off your leg with a shovel. You can pick up your leg and add it to your inventory, which you’ll need to do if you want to survive. And that’s the surprise, that you can survive the whole ordeal. In any other game, I’d expect to just bleed out (and you can), but Jack crosses the room, crouches, and taunts you with a bottle of healing medicine.

If you manage to crawl over and grab the bottle, you can put your leg back in place, pour some magic medicine on it, and watch it fuse back together. You put your goddamn leg back on. And then Jack slams his shovel down, let’s you know daddy’s coming, and the chase is back on. 

These scenes, rare as they are, all teach the player that Jack is a true madman. They also inform you about the state of the world (and strange regenerative state of Ethan, the main character), as well as delivering a punchy horror scene. When I watched my leg fuse mend and then heard Jack coming for me again, I was terrified of him as a person and horrified of what he might be capable of. He was no longer strictly a walking game over state. 

Death, like horror tropes in film, can and should be subverted in order to maintain tension before and after scares take place. Players shouldn’t be able to predict what happens before or after they shake hands with a threat, be it a monster or a man or a bunny with vampire teeth. Horror games are best when they strive to stay unfamiliar, and in adopting a familiar die-and-try-again videogame death system, they’re knocking the wind out of their scares already before anyone presses start.  

For more on horror, check out list of the best horror games on PC, our list of the horror game clichés that need to stop, and our hands-on impressions of Serious Metal Detecting, which isn't a horror game but playing it is like staring into a dark mirror and feeling nothing, forever and always. 

Last week, I talked to Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA designer Thomas Grip about how Resident Evil influenced the way he designs video games. He told me that the first time he saw Resident Evil, he never realized games could be made in such a way and that every horror game he's worked on has been influenced by Capcom's seminal horror series. 

But our conversation left me with some questions. I wanted to know what he thought the future of horror games held, so over the past week, we talked about what the "Exorcist of video games" looks like and how Frictional Games plans to pursue the telling of innovative stories.

Mat: How do you feel about the future of horror in video games? Do you feel like it's something that could go away at some point, much like how fighting games went out of vogue for a while?

Grip: Them going away seems extremely unlikely given that horror is a genre that has basically been around since humans first developed language. As for the future, I think that what we will be seeing a lot more of is horror simulators—games that put more effort into making the core mechanics about horror. As much as I love the first Resident Evil, for the most part, the game has the horror as a sort of thematic layer. At its core, Resident Evil is not about horror—it is about collecting ammo, shooting enemies, and solving puzzles. The horror aspects are just a wrapping on that. Compare that to a game like Alien: Isolation, where the game is really all about avoiding being eaten by the Alien creature. It feels like [Resident Evil 7] is going more in that direction as well. It is the sort of horror design I find the most intriguing and also the one that I think has the biggest impact on an audience. My hope is then that the horror will go away from hunted-by-monster scenarios and try to recreate other types of horror in a playable fashion. For instance, it would be interesting to figure out what the video game version of The Exorcist is.

That's a very interesting idea. As for some of the more popular horror games in recent years, it's hard to think of one where you're not hiding from, shooting at, or being chased by someone or something. What do you think something like The Exorcist looks like in video game form?

Grip: In terms of horror not about escaping from monsters, that was what we tried to dabble with a bit in SOMA. We did add monsters there, so it is obviously not a pure example, but we feel we at least learned from valuable lessons. And the idea is that we continue along that path, so it is totally something we want to explore.

The Exorcist of video games, however? Very hard to say. For one, I think you need to find some interesting play around the idea; for instance, wrapping it all as a sort of detective/mystery narrative. I don't think it needs to be The Exorcist either, just used that as an example where the monster/horror is handled differently compared to a movie like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or similar.

I guess being a video game limits you in some ways that movies don't. Do you feel that's true or is the more the other way around?

Grip: It goes both ways. Video games can do certain things that movies cannot, and vice versa. It is just that we are so used to seeing our stories in movie form; plus, movies have refined the storytelling process over a long time, and so we tend to consider movies as more versatile. But games also have a wide range of stories that they can tell, and many of them would be very hard to make into movies. For instance, games are very good at using real time—the time it actually takes to do certain things and having that as an engaging element in the story. But in movies that gets boring fast and you have to cut. 

As an example, in a horror game you can have the protagonist conducting a long investigation of a place and really have the audience get the mystery piece-by-piece at their own pace. In movies, this is really hard to do and longer investigations often have to be juxtaposed with something else in order to keep the engagement up. So games have the upper-hand in a lot of storytelling situations.

Do you feel that actually being able to interact with and influence video games through gameplay can detract from a story?

 Grip: The big problem is that videogames can be really fun to play, even if the story is crap. Really old movies are no longer much fun to watch, but old games—Pac-Man for instance—are still very fun. So there has been much less pressure on videogames as a medium to grow its storytelling potential. In movies, people quickly got tired of seeing people sneezing and trains going through tunnels. So there was a lot of pressure on making movies more engaging. But in videogames, we are sort of still happy with that sort of thing—there has not been any urgent need to make games more engaging, story-wise. For the most part, tweaking what we had from the start has been quite successful. 

Then there is also the fact that since books and movies are where we consume most of our stories, we are accustomed to them being presented in a certain way. Structured as a string of plot events at a certain pace. Video game stories don't really apply to those rules, and as such, it is not possible to just cram the Exorcist as-is into a game. And I think this in turn means that many people simply think it is not possible, and never really pursue the idea.

I would definitely say that SOMA focuses on telling a good story a lot more than Amnesia: The Dark Descent does. Is this a sign of you and everybody at Frictional wanting to pursue the telling of great stories that haven't been attempted in video games before? 

Grip: The intent behind SOMA was to tell a story and provide an experience that would only be possible in a video game. We also wanted to make a game where the themes were not just something in a background, but something the game was actually about. I think it went pretty well with SOMA, but I think we can do much better still. We totally plan to continue pursuing that. 

With Resident Evil 7 just days away from release, I reached out to some of the best horror developers out there to ask them how Resident Evil has shaped their lives and games. Last week, we learned that, without Resident Evil 4, Dead Space would have been System Shock 3. Now, I've talked to Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA designer Thomas Grip about how Capcom's survival horror series has influenced him throughout the years.

The first time Grip had ever seen Resident Evil was when he was flipping through the pages of a game magazine, of which he doesn't remember the name. What he saw of Resident Evil that day, however, is something he'll never forget.

"I remember there being this big article where it compared the dangers you face to different death scenes in horror movies," he recalled. "That really grabbed my attention... I must have been 15 at the time."

And when Grip first got his hands on Resident Evil, he was blown away, having never seen anything like it before.

"I was really unaware that you could make games like this," he told me. "The mixture of action, exploration, and puzzles was completely new to me, and it fit me perfectly.

"I especially remember one moment when I was talking to a friend over the phone as I was playing, and one of these lizard monsters suddenly jumped out. It took me by surprise, and I just screamed out loud. A game had never made me feel these emotions before, and it was awesome. I craved more!"

In addition to his love for playing the games, Grip told me that his passion for Resident Evil has informed every horror game he's designed. The impact the survival horror series has had on him has been nothing short of huge.

"It has been a guiding light for pretty much everything I have done," he said. "I think one of the most basic features is to have a very scene-centric design approach. What I mean by this is that you think of your encounters less like elements of a level, and more like a certain emotional scene you want to convey. Resident Evil is filled with great examples of this, like the first dog encounter or the shark attack. It can also be less intense sections; for instance, simply walking outside and hearing crickets chirping. Resident Evil builds so much around letting each section of the game have it's own mood and story, and that has been extremely influential."

With all the games Resident Evil has influenced, it's interesting to see the next game in the series, Resident Evil 7, take an approach that is very familiar to Grip and other horror developers. The first-person perspective has become ever-so-popular over the years with games like Amnesia, Outlast, and Alien: Isolation. Now, Resident Evil is taking a stab at it, and Grip couldn't be happier."It is really exciting," he said. "I recently played the demo and I think they had a really nice spin on the first-person horror genre. The demo had many things in common with other weaponless horror, but it still managed to have that distinct Resident Evil feel to it. 

"For the last 15 years, I have basically been doing first-person versions of Resident Evil, and it is awesome to finally have an official version of that."

Resident Evil 7 launches January 24. In the meantime, you can check out our  rankings of every Resident Evil game, from worst to best.

We’ve been playing stealth games for decades now, infiltrating military bases undetected, choking henchmen from behind and packing ventilation shafts with their naked unconscious bodies. But making sneaking fun isn’t easy. Full spatial awareness, how to communicate your visibility, and reliability of tools and AI behaviors are a hard thing to pin down. Luckily, these games pull it off without disturbing a single dust mote. They’re the best stealth games you can play on the PC right now, and what we recommend for players looking to get their super quiet feet wet. 

Deus Ex

Deus Ex' sandbox structure made it a landmark study in open-ended design. The large environments and varied upgrade tree are designed to give you ways to solve tasks expressively, using imagination and forethought instead of a big gun. Nearly every stealth game on this list borrows something from Deus Ex, and it’s easy to see why.

Deus Ex pulled off experimental, player-driven stealth design in huge, tiered environments. It was the cyberpunk espionage dream, and for many modern developers, it still is. The last two entries in the series, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, play with similar, more streamlined design, and while we recommend them as well, they still can’t brush with the complexity and novelty of the original. If you’re not big on playing old games, install some mods like Deus Ex Revision, and give it a shot.

Hitman

After Hitman: Absolution, it seemed that Blood Money would stay the golden standard for silly stealth sandbox shenanigans indefinitely, but IO Interactive surprised us all with Hitman’s new episodic format. For the better part of 2016, we were treated with a new level every month, each featuring a different setting, layout, and pocket universe of NPCs going about their clockwork lives. Agent 47 is the screwdriver you get to jam in wherever you choose. Watching the mechanism break around you (and reacting to it when things go wrong) is central to Hitman’s charm.I like the way Phil put it in his season review: “Strip away the theme and fantasy, and you're left with a diorama of moving parts—a seemingly perfect system of loops, each intersecting to create a complex scene. It's left to you to decide how you want to break it—whether it's by surgically removing key actors, or by violently smashing it all up with guns, bombs and a stuffed moose.”

Supported with a steady stream of updates, including temporary Elusive Targets and remixed levels, it’s still possible to play the entirety of season one in new ways (and season two is already in development). We might be getting a steady stream of Hitman forever, and videogames are better for it.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

In the years since Chaos Theory, Splinter Cell and the majority of stealth games have veered from a focus on purely covert scenarios, and it’s easy to see why. Chaos Theory is a complex, punishing stealth game whose gratification is severely delayed (for the better). Getting through an area without a soul knowing takes pounds of patience and observation, and getting caught is not easy to recover from. It was a slow, arduous crawl, but a crawl unlike any other in the genre, with a level of realism we haven’t seen since. 

Accompanied by a Sam Fisher at peak Jerk Cowboy, as difficult as it was, we laughed through the pain. The multiplayer was also a bold experiment in asymmetry at the time, pitting Sam-Fishery spies against first-person shooting soldiers in a tense game of hide and seek.

Thief 2

Alongside Deus Ex, the Thief series introduced new variables to stealth games that have since been adopted as a standard nearly across the board. Using light and shadow as central to your visibility, Thief made stealth much more than the visible-or-not dichotomy of implied vision cones. 

The Thief series is still unparalleled in the subtlety of its narrative and environmental design. Jody Macgregor sums it up in a piece on the very subject: “Thief II ramps up the number of secrets within each level, but even with as many as a dozen hidden rooms and stashes to discover their placement is always just as subtle. A shooting range conceals a lever among the arrows embedded in the wall behind the targets, a bookshelf is slightly out of alignment, a glint of light pokes through the edge of a stone in a wall. Compare that to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which sometimes hides one of the many ducts you can climb into behind a crate but more often plonks them into the corner of rooms beside a neon sculpture.”

The first two Thief games are interchangeable as the ‘best’ for most players, so be sure to play them both, but the second takes the cake as a best-of recommendation for working out some UI and AI kinks from the original. But with both games, install a few mods and it’s fairly simple to make them easier on the eyes and our modern design sensibilities. 

Mark of the Ninja

The biggest challenge facing stealth games has always been how to communicate whether or not you’re visible to enemies. While we’re still working out the kinks in 3D games, Mark of the Ninja solved just about every problem with two dimensions. 

Through clear UI cues, it’s easy to tell how much noise you’re making, whether or not a guard can hear it, and what spaces in the environment are completely safe to hide. There’s almost no room for error, at least in how you interpret the environment and your stealthy (or not) status within it. Accompanied by swift, springy platforming control and a robust ninja ability upgrade tree, by the end of Mark of the Ninja the challenge reaches high, but so too does your skill.

Dishonored 2

What surprised me most about Dishonored 2 is the density of its level design. Like other stealthy immersive sims, it features huge levels with any number of potential routes for getting through, but Dishonored 2 is the first to make me want to see every inconsequential alleyway. Nearly every space is as detailed as a room in Gone Home, decorated with natural props and people that tell a specific story. 

There are more systems and choices than ever, and while you explore, how you dispose of or sneak by guards is a playful exercise in self-expression and experimentation. Emily and Corvo have their own unique abilities, and a single playthrough won’t get you all their powers. Summon eldritch tentacle arms to fling psychically chained enemies into the sea, or freeze time and possess a corpse during for a particularly, uh, daring escape. Just make sure not to miss Sokolov’s adventure journals, they’re a treat.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

I think The Phantom Pain’s appeal is best summarized by how everything going wrong typically means everything is actually going well. Samuel’s anecdote from his review is a perfect example: “I forfeited a perfect kill-free stealth run of one mission because I couldn’t get a good enough sniper angle on my target before he took off in a chopper. Sprinting up flights of stairs to the helipad, my victim spotted me just in time for me to throw every grenade in my inventory under the chopper, destroying it, vanquishing him and knocking me over, before I made a ludicrously frantic escape on horseback. It was amazing, and I’m not sure it would’ve been vastly improved had I silently shot the guy and snuck out.” Wish I could’ve seen it, Sam.

For a series to go from weighed down by cutscenes, spouting nonsense about nuclear war and secret Cold War contracts with a few simple stealth sequences to a full blown open world stealth sandbox masterpiece (and on the PC too) was quite the surprise. As a silent Big Boss, there are hundreds of hours of wide open stealth scenarios to tackle in MGS5, despite its thinner second chapter. Systemically, this is one of the most surprising stealth games ever made, and as bittersweet a swan song as Kojima could leave us with before departing Konami for good.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

It took me six months to finish Amnesia. It doesn’t allow you to play stealth games the way you’re used to, and by removing old habits, so goes your sense of security. The sanity mechanic intentionally denies you your habits by distorting your view and slowing down your character while looking at a patrolling enemy monster. Lovely, beautiful, safe, warm light also plays a part. The darker an environment, the sooner you’ll lose sanity, but if you whip out a lantern, guess who’s going to spot it? That gross bag of skin patrolling the halls. The enemy AI isn’t particularly smart or surprising, but in an atmosphere as rich as Amnesia’s you’ll think they were put on this earth to hunt you down, specifically. If you can stomach the scares, it’s a must.

Alien: Isolation

More than an incredible homage to ‘70s futuretech and the world of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece in horror, Alien: Isolation’s chief antagonist is a major step forward in first-person stealth horror design. The alien is a constant, erratic threat. It actively hunts you, listening for every small noise and clue of your presence, hiding in wait above for a sneak attack or—what’s that sprouting from your chest? Nice try. But besides the accomplished alien AI, Isolation makes good on its 25-hour playtime by constantly switching things up. 

As Andy Kelly wrote in his review, “In one level you might lose the use of your motion tracker. In another, the alien won't be around so you can merrily shotgun androids like it's Doom 3. Then your weapons will be taken away, forcing you to make smart use of your gadgets. It does this all the way through, forcing you to adapt and readapt to different circumstances, using all the tools at your disposal.” Alien: Isolation is both a striking, authentic homage to the films, and a consistently creative stealth gauntlet. If you don’t mind getting spooked, don’t miss it.

Invisible, Inc

Invisible, Inc nails the slow tension and tactical consideration of XCOM, but places an emphasis on subversion of enemies and security placements rather than direct confrontation. You’re not an overwhelming offensive force, and getting spotted almost always spells your doom. 

Chris puts it well in our Best Design award from 2015: “To the stealth sim, it introduces completely transparent rules. You always know what your options are, what the likely results of your actions will be, and your choices are always mitigated by resources that you have complete control over. There’s no chance failure, and very little trial and error. You either learn to make all of these totally-fair systems dance, or you fail.”

The turned based format means you get unlimited time to make a decision that would take a split second in a real time stealth game, but because of the extra space for consideration, Invisible Inc. piles on the systems, making every infiltration a true challenge, but one comprised of fair, transparent rule sets. Dishonored may test your sneaking reflexes, but do you have the deep smarts to be a spy? Invisible, Inc will let you know one way or the other.